


In His Bones

by LissiaMoonstone



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1990s, Abused Harry Potter, Abusive Dursley Family (Harry Potter), Abusive Vernon Dursley, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Child Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Eating Disorders, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, POV Harry Potter, Physical Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Young Tom Riddle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 20:55:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29338668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LissiaMoonstone/pseuds/LissiaMoonstone
Summary: Despite years of staring up at a cupboard ceiling, and out of barred windows, praying for someone (anyone) to take him away, no one comes to save Harry. He knows he must learn to live with that. At least, he supposes guiltily, he is not alone.
Relationships: Harry Potter & Tom Riddle, Harry Potter & Tom Riddle | Voldemort, Harry Potter/Tom Riddle, Harry Potter/Tom Riddle | Voldemort, Harry Potter/Voldemort
Comments: 24
Kudos: 255





	1. Harry

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for physical and verbal/psychological child abuse. Please don't read if you're unsure.
> 
> This was meant to be super dark, but instead to me it reads very bittersweet. I hope you get something out of this; it was cathartic for me to write. I’d really appreciate any feedback!

As a child, Harry doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know why it’s happening. He just wants it to stop. With every raised hand, with every cower, with every bruise, he is chipped away at like fragile china. He is a teacup smashed against the floor time and time again without any regard to the consequences.

All he knows is the purpling of bruises on his arms and legs and _just keep going just keep going just keep going_.

He doesn’t say a word when he starts reception, thin and tiny, and the other children laugh at him. He’s scared that if he speaks up it will become so much worse. The worst times are when everyone else is quiet, and Harry tries to control his breathing as it rattles in his ears, impossibly loud, knowing deep in his bones if he doesn’t shut up then _‘they’ll give him something to cry about’_. It’s all such work. Often, he thinks it would be so much easier if he didn’t exist.

Most of his classmates are loud, excitable, normal. However, he is not completely alone. There is one other boy who always chooses a seat at the back, who stares resolutely and refuses to speak to anyone. Yet though Harry’s voice dies from fear, this boy seems to stay quiet to avoid wasting his breath. Disdain fills his dark, cold eyes whenever he is called upon. Teachers dote on his cleverness and berate his rude silence, but he doesn’t seem to care either way. 

Harry wishes he didn’t care too.

Strangely, as the years pass by, he notices that he seems to be the only exception to the other boy’s general world hatred. Tom often sits by him unannounced, dropping his bag and pulling out his equipment like his place by Harry is his birth right, glaring daggers at a class full of kids that never wanted the spot anyway. When Harry stumbles over his maths, he is there to help, explaining the methods in a way Harry can actually understand. And when Harry’s eyes start to go and the Dursleys bicker about getting him glasses, he even tilts his exercise book towards Harry during spelling tests, to his eternal gratitude.

To say thank you, Harry spends a week drawing Tom in one of his old diary pages, huddled in his cupboard under the stairs with an old flash light and a shaky hand. He shyly passes it to him one afternoon, and that cold, reserved face lights up, like sun breaking through clouds on a winters day. Tom says it’s the most beautiful gift he’s ever received. Harry thinks he’s the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

Vernon catches him up late one night returning the flash light to the kitchen cupboard, and bangs his head against the refrigerator. It hurts, like everything does, but Harry knows it is worth it. The lump on his forehead will last a few weeks, but the memory of Tom’s bewildered, besotted smile directed at him will last forever, if he thinks on it hard enough; wishing on stars for it to never fade.

  
When he grows old enough to stop wishing on stars for a secret letter, some miraculous saviour to whisk them away, he becomes angry. He becomes righteous. Knows deep in his bones that he will never treat another the way he has been treated. He talks back, and gets it ten times worse. Purpling bruises are well known to his body, but it’s the screaming and shouting that he never quite grows used to; that lives in his head like a vengeful ghost. He shuffles through constant states of hiding and screaming out, rotted with a bottomless rage but repressed with fear. A few attempts at running, finding help, being saved, are made, but the policemen tut judgementally and look right through him. Resolving to hold tight, knowing deep in his bones that no one cares, he says nothing more. It becomes a waiting game. Six more years. Five more years. Four. Three. He stops counting.

The impact of the violence is unbearable now. Tom tries to take care of him, to pick him up from the ground when he’s crying on the kerb, but Harry swats his hand away. Screams at him that he doesn't understand and leaves.

But Harry knows Tom does understand. All too well.

He feels the crushing weight of guilt settle in his bones that night, as he lays shivering in his thin blanket. From then on he’s not sure it ever leaves him.

  
As an adult, Harry’s anger dissolves along with every other feeling. Falls through his fingers like sand. Sometimes he cries when he tries to get up and wash, brush his hair, look after himself, make himself food. The ugly feeling of unworthiness claws up his throat and burns, has him retching on the bathroom floor or holding a blade to a pale forearm.

Sometimes he is so deadened by feeling he can’t move, and other times he is so overwhelmed by feeling he can’t breathe. The ache in his chest remains a constant. No matter where he is, whether he’s stretched by a grin with Ron and Hermione or sobbing in a corner on his own, he feels the pain like a lead weight pressed on him, weighing him down forevermore.

The other wouldn’t understand. Tom is tough, hardened. He didn’t hold the same conviction Harry did as a teenager. His conviction was to make them all hurt, because if he had to hurt, then so did they. He doesn’t struggle to get up every day. He is cold and perfect. He doesn’t allow himself to feel pain.

Harry is jealous beyond words.

Although the other is cold, and perfect, and unfeeling, he still makes an exception when it comes to Harry. Harry has never known what he did to deserve such a highly priced kindness. He doesn’t feel worthy. When Tom presses kisses to his forehead and calls him beautiful, he squirms away, brow furrowing automatically, green eyes staring to the floor. It doesn’t stop the man; instead it seems to make him more insistent with his efforts and his care. Needs that Harry has never thought to vocalise are appeased by Tom automatically. The handsome man takes him out, when Harry has the energy, and treats him to treacle tart, watching him swallow everything down with a strange insistence in his gaze. Flowers sometimes appear at his doorstep; fragrant bouquets of lilies and freesias, always met with Harry’s eternally confused but polite gratitude.

It almost makes him think, _what does he want? What is he trying to get from me?_

But he knows that Tom’s public persona, his charming but soulless mask, is never utilised with him. He has always been unfailingly blunt and honest, even in his kindness. Harry knows Tom isn’t trying to get anything from him, but the idea of someone simply trying to make him happy for happiness’ sake has him roiling in an ugly confusion of _why me why me why me?_ He has never had a framework for care like this. He doesn’t know how to trust it. But Tom is nothing if not insistent on getting his own way, even if his own way is just the sight of Harry’s world weary grin after a long day.

  
After a long while, Harry learns the art of the mask. His isn’t quite as refined as Tom’s, but he is no longer a constant open wound, sore and snapping and resentful, which makes day to day life a little easier. He has no problem smiling winningly as he takes an order at work, making coffees and chatting away with his colleagues, no longer quite as afraid of saying the wrong thing, the wrong word, looking at someone wrong, breathing wrong.

It takes nothing but the sight of a haggard old face from the past for Harry’s carefully crafted mask to crumble to pieces.

Petunia Dursley looks him straight in the eyes, and Harry can’t breathe. He thinks he asks her for her order, but he doesn’t remember; isn’t really present though his feet are on the ground. He ends up sliding an espresso towards her, refusing to pass it for fear of touching, almost knocking it over with the shake in his fingers. He thinks he looks at her once more, forces himself to, his eyes timid and skittering. He can’t recall much of what he says or does, but her face is imprinted on his brain, flat and dead and sharklike.

That afternoon he signs off work early, walks to Tom’s unannounced and cries into the man’s arms, unable to articulate a response to any of his frantic questions. He wants to burrow into Tom’s chest so deeply that he never has to leave and face the world again.

He picks himself back up, after many hours, and reconstructs the mask Tom taught him so lovingly to build, but he is newly embittered by that sixty second moment in the coffee shop. The once buried truth, the unspoken knowledge that justice will never happen for him, now rises again. It clags and suffocates in his chest; becomes a vile taste in his throat he is never rid of. His lover sweetens it for him however he can, showering that strange, alien adoration on him until he is light and smiling once more.

  
On Harry’s twenty fourth birthday, he wakes up to the news of a fire on nearby Privet Drive.

Two dead, one critically injured in hospital. Unknown circumstances.

The news calls it a tragedy. Neighbours are interviewed, faces pallid with shock, as others crane their necks in the background, wanting a piece of the action, like vultures on a carcass. They say it couldn’t have happened to a nicer, more normal family. 

Tom is smiling that day when he delivers the largest bouquet Harry has ever seen.


	2. Tom

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You are a fanfiction author. You are trying to get established. You have countless unfinished WIPs that people actually want you to update. What do you do?
> 
> You write extra for a random one shot, obviously. Of course. What else?
> 
> Hope you enjoy, guys. This is Tom's part. I've never written from his perspective before so this should be ... interesting.

Tom’s first memory is of him tottering forwards and reaching both arms out to the tall caretaker lady. His big brown eyes are curious, questioning, seeking out something he can’t yet describe.

His second memory is coloured vividly with purpling bruises and icy, blue fear. It is dark, and he knows he is alone.

  
As a child, Tom wonders, sometimes, why he is not like everyone else. He doesn’t have friends. He doesn’t want friends. He doesn’t have suited and housewived parents to beam down at him and swing him in their hands, or attend parents evenings with dutiful expectations and stern words. He has the cold, hard bed of an orphanage, aloneness, and the mistrust of everyone who catches his eye. Sometimes he wonders, dully, at the lack of dignity.

Mrs. Cole stares at him often, face drawn, lips tight. Treats him like he is the embodiment of the devil, like she can’t take her eyes away for even a second for what he might do. He isn’t quite sure what he has done to deserve it, and spite wells in his stomach, the bitter taste creeping onto his tongue and spilling out with the few words he ever utters. Sometimes, when she is madder and braver, she tries to beat the badness out of him, but Tom thinks she manages to drag his soul out instead. Deep in his bones, he feels hollow and old. He becomes a hard shell with seemingly nothing inside, no vulnerability surviving behind his dark eyes. The other children, at home and school, react to him as if he is a spectre; fearful of his eerie disposition, at once appalled by and jealous of his mind.

He learns to enjoy their fear; to feed on it. Why shouldn’t he? If they are so determined to paint him as evil, he can become the villain they want. They think he is fearsome? He will outlive their expectations. He will become ten times the monster with ten times the power and he will survive.

For a while, he thinks this bitter, malevolent power is enough. But there is another boy in that run down classroom who is alone, just like he is. With messy dark hair, captivating green eyes and hands that shake when they rise to answer a question, voice small, words brilliant.

He doesn’t want friends, but he does want ... that one.

Tom thinks if they have to be alone, then they can be alone together. He will make it happen.

  
Over the years, he almost convinces himself that he truly is a monster; an unfeeling reptile, cold as ice, akin to how everybody else saw him. But the day Dennis and Amy rip up Harry’s artwork, mock Tom about his ‘stupid diary’ and his ‘gay drawing’, he realises just how wrong he is.

His face is stone. He blinks away the water in his eyes. If he were alone, he might have let his sadness show, but he has an image to maintain, and so he moves immediately to his next course of action.

After all, he isn’t an unfeeling reptile. The stone melts. His righteous rage is hot and vengeful; flames licking like hell at his feet. He knows he can wield it, if he wants. Can will it to burn everything around him to ash.

_Sentiment precious valuable **mine**._

_How dare you take my things from me?_

_My only possession, my only gift; you will **suffer** -_

From then on, he gets his own room at the orphanage, and no one dares to touch him ever again. No one except Harry. Beautiful, perfect, lovely Harry. Malnourished, pale, weary Harry. When Tom sees him at school, he feeds him scraps of food he manages to scare out of the other runts, and never tells him where he acquires them from, or the sorry fate of the treasure he gave him.

Tom has never much cared about the woes and sorrows of others, but the thought of any more tears on that lovely face makes his shrivelled heart crumple down further in his chest.

  
Once small, an oddball, Tom grows up to be tall and handsome. His muscles fill out, strong and capable. He gains real, sustained attention and respect for the first time, and recognises this as his first real form of power; his first currency. Naturally, he uses it for anything and everything he can eke out of it. Why not take advantage of every available resource? He must do what he can to survive. To win.

People ogle shamelessly, fawning and simpering, repulsing him with their obvious desire even as he expertly manipulates it. In contrast, Harry’s glances linger only slightly, as if afraid to draw an ire that Tom could simply never feel. He blushes very attractively, clouds of rose red dusting sparsely over his soft, pale cheeks. Tom finds flimsy excuses to make him blush more; brushes his fingers when passing him pens and smirks lasciviously when he flirts.

But Harry doesn’t seem to understand what Tom really wants. One day in their first year of sixth form, when Tom is particularly overt with his regard, Harry snaps, snatching the wrist he is caressing away and running. He doesn’t talk to him for three days, and it is easily the worst three days of Tom’s life, like the only light has gone out and all he has is darkness and dread. The feeling of his soul dragged out, missing pieces, spilled across the floor, ugly and broken, is back and it is unbearable. What can he do? This isn’t something he can manhandle and control. He is helpless. He looks in the mirror at his beautiful face and has never felt more rotten inside.

Tom goes to visit him to apologise, and is all but melted by adoration when a tearful Harry jumps into his arms and begs for a forgiveness that could never be necessary.

_“I just thought you were mocking me.”_

And does Harry not know how silly he sounds? He is beautiful. He is perfect. No one has ever been able to beat the goodness and the light out of his incredible soul. He is the most precious gem, a thing of fragile, breathtaking beauty, an artefact that cannot be valued. He is an unshatterable diamond, retaining his honest vulnerability and surviving no matter how many times the axe swings down at him. Tom is not worthy, but he will try to be, every day of his damned life.

  
All the success in the world, all Tom’s accomplishments and awards, all his progress and success and control and _power_ and he still could not prevent something as simple as this. A chance meeting at a fucking coffee shop.

As Harry’s tears dry on his shirt, his lover’s head nestling against his chest, all he can think, all he knows, deep in his bones, is that he wants them all to hurt. More than anything he’s ever wanted in his life, and he’s wanted a lot of things.

He has wanted to drag himself up from the dirt. To achieve greatness. To pull them up from the misery and the squalor and the cold and the indignity of their start in life. To make sure that they never had to hide from the mindless rage of a fist or steal for sustenance again.

To protect Harry. To provide for him.

But more than anything on Earth, he wants to make them all hurt.

Fight fire with fire. He wants them to burn.

Why should they get off scot-free? They _beat_ a _child_. Starved him. Deprived him. They are _abusers_ , the societal definition of repellent, repugnant scum, but apparently when faced with little brats who need punishing, the rules go out of the window. Tom reviles it. Deep in his bones. Loathes the hypocritical, egoistic, ignorant human race, who pick and choose when to care based on their flimsily constructed ideals of false morality. Years of insipid comments from the privileged many, who will never really know what it is like to be damned, have made his blood boil under his skin, hot and virulent with nowhere to bubble over.

Tom won’t hunt down Mrs. Cole. She will be in her seventies by now, by his reckoning, too pitiful and weak to wield a cane any longer, too feeble to raise a thin, veined hand flat and hard. It will be more of a punishment to let her live out the very weakest and worst of her days. For her to feel the indignity he felt for too long.

There are other, more pressing issues to be handled that are a far better use of his time.

People have always wanted to cast him as the devil. Why not take on the role?

He thinks Judgement rather becomes him.

  
On Harry’s twenty fourth birthday, Tom brings six dozen red roses, delicate and lovely. Harry seems distracted, disoriented, dissociated, when he answers the door, like he’s half there, half living in another time. Mired in confusion, he frowns, as if Tom hasn’t been there for every one of his birthdays since they were seven. But his beautiful eyes alight on the flowers, and all of a sudden he glows, and holds out his open hand with a shy smile.

Later, when Tom curls around him in bed, forever protective, forever adoring, the other still hasn’t brought it up. The radio plays in the background [ _well known family, pillars of the community …_ ]. Harry doesn’t acknowledge it, burrowing impossibly closer in his hold.

Tom decides that maybe not everything needs to be said. He kisses Harry’s forehead, breathes in deeply, and pulls himself up to change the station.


End file.
